There are many different exciting uses for a chatbot based solution but the common theme is always automation and personalization. Whether it is lead qualification, customer support, chat broadcasting or any other task, the goal is not only reducing the manual labor but creating a flow that is utilizing the know how and best practice you have collected over the years making all the interactions a perfectly performing experience.

One of our favorite recent implementations was specifically created to help the hiring process in a relatively small team where there is no dedicated HR department but the projects have really short turnaround times and vastly different requirements so finding and selecting the right talent is a top priority challenge.

 

Who is Canecom and how did the idea of a hiring bot appear?

“We are specialized in custom software development projects, from funky mobile apps to complex CMS and full backend systems, we do them all. Due to the nature of our projects, the requirements are always quickly changing, there are always new and exciting challenges ahead which require our team to be really agile and flexible. We have a strong core team but we work with many freelance and part time developers on a project basis depending on the workload and skillset required at any given time. This means that we have job interviews scheduled pretty much every week and that takes up an awful amount of our time. We don’t have a dedicated HR department that could handle the task and we always need the project manager and the technical lead to evaluate the candidate anyway so streamlining the process and making it as effective as possible was always a priority for us.

Most of our candidates check us out on social media and open our website as well but need to send an e-mail with their CVs at the end and that has a relatively slow response time. We wanted something more instant and immediate and also something that enables information to flow both ways, from and to the candidate. We find that chat is the best alternative as it fulfills all of our requirements and the questions and answers can be “scripted” and then automated so the candidates get immediate replies and we don’t need to wait days to get all the information we need by emailing back and forth. The whole communication becomes really snappy and this is what our projects demand.”

How did you implement it? How do you use it?

“We wanted to solve two main problems. Scheduling interviews and pre-filtering candidates. As I mentioned, hiring needs the involvement of our most important and experienced colleagues, senior developers and managers responsible for each project. Their time is extremely limited and always better spent with coding or managing other aspects of the software projects. We have placed a chatbot on our Facebook page and connected the same solution to our website. This way, new candidates checking us out can immediately get in touch with us. There is a simple, straight to the point menu where they can check out the available career opportunities and easily start a conversation with the bot. We can instantly ask our favorite qualification questions so by the time the senior developers and managers get to check out the CVs coming in, we already have a pretty solid idea about the experience and skillset of the given candidate. We love to work with junior colleagues but there are times when the scope and timing of the project requires a really experienced senior. We have our own talent pool that we can reach out to and we have many returning guys that we worked together on various projects but there are times when we need a really specific knowledge for example about a brand new technology that no one in the team has. We configured the flow to ask different relevant questions depending on the position the candidate is applying for so we can make sure they have exactly what we are looking for.

They can drag and drop their CVs into the conversation and the bot is collecting contact details at the end of the conversation. If we like the candidate and would like to schedule an interview, we can really easily schedule an online call. We do this by broadcasting a message to all promising candidates in that round with a Calendly invite where they can easily see the available slots in the schedule, further avoiding emailing back and forth. Luckily multichat.ai can assign tags to users based on their answers in the conversation and we can also do that manually when reviewing the CVs so segmenting the candidates takes only two clicks when we are sending out replies. We really like this as it makes Canecom seem a really responsive and modern company.”

What are the main benefits for you?

“Time management is extremely important for us so we keep track of all of our tasks and the time they take. We found that communication with the candidates, scheduling calls, emailing back and forth ..etc. can take 27-32% of the time our colleagues spend with hiring. This was quite surprising for us as this is a significant amount of their time. Since we have the hiring bot in place, we could reduce this by more than 80% so our colleagues simply need to review the CVs coming in and join when the call starts, the rest is taken care by the system. This saves us some really precious time that we can use for other aspects of our projects.

Some of our projects have really short term deadlines so it is important for us to have a system that is highly flexible and really easy to reconfigure when the current project is over and we have updated requirements for the next one. Multichat.ai allows this for us, we can really quickly build new conversations or modify and re-use some of the existing ones. In addition to that, we have colleagues scattered across the world in many different time zones, we encourage and support remote work. Having a system that can reply 24/7 on all 365 days of the year is a god sent and an invaluable help for us. This is not only a great benefit for us internally but also a really positive sign for the new applicants so it often gets complimented by the candidates. They compare it to some of the other places they send in their CVs to where they need to wait days or weeks even (if they get a response at all) so it is a much better experience to them which is really important for us. I think this is why we have a lot more CVs coming in than previously, people are much more willing to interact. This is especially true for developers as they often don’t like to take part in pre-qualification phone calls but are happy to interact with a chatbot and share more useful information about themselves.”

What are the first 6 months results?

“We implemented this solution at the beginning of this year and we have it running ever since. There were 3 major projects where we needed multiple people quickly and multichat.ai helped us in finding 3 new front-end developers, 4 guys for backend development tasks, a new UX designer and a sales guy. This means 9 successful hires for us and more than 70 people applying for these positions in total. We have a much larger talent pool now that we can reach out to than ever before. We feel that the qualification process has also improved as the chatbot always asks all the best and most relevant questions so there are no exceptions when a colleague in the rush of a project forgets to forward some of the questions or come back to a candidate. Our new colleagues were also happy with this method which is a huge plus for us, we want to attract top talent so the first impression about our company is key. “

What are your plans for the future?

“We are really happy with the results and would like to further integrate multichat.ai into our hiring process. It is in our short term plans to integrate the chatbot into all of our job ads as sort of a conversational landing page so people interested in the ad can immediately start to chat and ask about the opening. Due to the internal success of the technology we are also thinking about making the chatbot an essential part of our onboarding process as an always available agent helping with FAQ and useful information, always pointing our newest colleagues in the right direction even if no one is available from the core team at that time.”

If you like the idea of a hiring bot or have another idea in mind for a specific use, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.